We define ourself as the one who serves others, but we rarely let others serve us.  Why is that?  Is that because you’re afraid of your own weakness and struggles and afraid others will be repelled by it too?  Is it just a trap you’ve got yourself into?  We love our church family when we honestly allow them to see our needs and let them serve us in love. Love keeps on loving.  Jesus’ love doesn’t give up.

What is the identifying mark of Jesus’ Church?  I wonder how you’d answer that?  Theologically rich songs, correct theology, good preaching, good coffee, evangelism?

Do you see what Jesus says?  “As I have loved you, so you must love one another.  By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”  It’s the radical Jesus’ like love for one another that declares to the world that the church is full of Jesus’ disciples.  In the church we need to love one another like this, and outside the church the lost need to see us loving one another like this.  So, what does that look like this week?  In a sense every “one another” we’ll look at and those that we won’t shows us a facet of how we love one another like Jesus loves us.  But let me draw your attention to some specific ways we love one another among many others.

Love by being present with.  John 1 tells us that Jesus is God made flesh, come to dwell with us full of truth and grace.  John 3v16-17 tells us Jesus becomes a man because of love.  To love like Jesus is to be present with his people.  The act of gathering with your church family is an act of love for your church family.  It is an act of one anothering.  An encouragement in ways we often don’t know and can’t see.  Prioritise being present with one another.

But we also need to be present with one another apart from Sunday. Visiting someone shut in their home, or in the hospital, or simply spending time with someone as part of the everyday. Love begins with being present with.

Love serves.  Jesus as he utters these words in John 13v45-35 has just finished washing their feet.  It’s an enacted parable of what he’ll do for them at the cross, so when he says they should wash one another’s feet he doesn’t mean they need to die for one another they don’t.  We also don’t get stories in Acts of them washing one another’s feet.  What he means is what it symbolises.

If you’d walked into that room that night and seen that scene of Jesus’ bent over washing feet, who would you have assumed was most important and who was least important?  Jesus takes the role of a servant because he loves.  To love like Jesus is to serve like Jesus.  To do mundane, lowly things for others.  To not see ourselves as better than but as servants of.

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